Dow Plans North American Plastic Waste Recovery Facilities

Dow Chemical and Canadian company Klean Industries are collaborating to build waste recovery facilities throughout North America for recovering energy, chemicals, and oil from nonrecycled plastics. The agreement especially targets used plastic packaging materials.

The two companies' three-year letter of intent covers the combination of their resources and proprietary technologies to convert end-of-life mixed plastics into useful products. Klean's advanced thermal conversion technology is used in the world's largest plastics-to-oil recycling plant in Japan. The Japanese plant, which processes 50 metric tons (55.12 US tons) per day, "is the only technology we have seen that has consistently operated for over a decade on a commercial scale," said Jeff Wooster, Dow's global sustainability leader, performance plastics, in a press release.

Dow Chemical and Klean Industries are collaborating to build waste recovery facilities throughout North America for recovering energy, chemicals, and oil from nonrecycled waste plastics, using gasification systems such as this one. (Source: Klean Industries)

The plant that Dow visited in Japan can process mixed plastics, including PET and PVC, as well as the more common polyethylene, polypropylene, and polystyrene. Klean, a manufacturer of pyrolysis and gasification plants and equipment, specializes in systems that use plastic and used tires as feedstocks to produce fuel. Depending on the plastic, Klean says it's possible to recover approximately 950 liters (250.9 gallons) of oil from each metric ton of mixed plastic waste.

In the waste recovery facilities planned under the agreement with Dow, Klean will be using "our integrated gasification system, which will produce two primary products: an ultra-low sulphur diesel fuel, and green electricity that will be export to the grid," said a company spokesman in an email to Design News.

Gasification uses pressure, steam, and heat to convert plastic waste and other materials, both liquid and solid, into a syngas as the primary energy product, not the flue gas that results from incineration. Syngas, when mixed with air, can be used with minimal modifications to gasoline or diesel engines. In contrast to pyrolysis and most commercial gasification processes, which don't use oxygen, Klean's gasification process uses a small amount of air to produce partial combustion of a small amount of the feedstock. The oxygen optimizes the yield of syngas by assisting the breakdown of the waste's heavy organic compounds. Klean's process also differs from other commercial gasification in operating temperature, internal/external heating ratio, and reactor design.

Klean's processes convert oil-based waste streams, including end-of-life plastics, into high-grade liquid fuels, syngas, electricity, and nano-scale carbon black fillers. The company's customers include energy utilities, waste management companies, manufacturing businesses, and government bodies in North America and Europe. The company was profiled in the ground-breaking American Chemistry Council-sponsored study, "Conversion technology: A complement to plastic recycling."

Dow has previously conducted pilot tests to make energy from recycled linear low-density polyethylene (LLDPE) scrap film generated in one of the company's extrusion laboratories. The tests resulted in recovering 96 percent of the available energy after incinerating 578 lb of used plastic in a kiln at one of Dow's waste treatment facilities. The recovered energy, equivalent to 11.1 million BTUs of natural gas, was used as fuel to power Dow's incinerator while conducting the pilot test. One of the stated long-term goals of Dow Performance Plastics' business is to recycle 100 percent of its used packaging.

I am really happy to see this kind of effort happening and the reality of true plastic recovery facilities. Most people don't realize that plastic can only be recycled once and then downcycled...but that it ultimately ends up in a landfill or in the ocean. I am a surfer, so I see the result of the latter on beaches and in the sea all the time. It also ends up choking marine life, which eat plastic bags or rings and end up dying as a result. It is really an important step for a big company like Dow to do something to help not only mitigate the plastic problem but also turn it into something truly reuseable and beneficial. Thanks for covering this, Ann. I will keep my eye on this space.

Elizabeth, plastic can also be upcycled--it's not easy to do but a few companies, including SABIC, have figured that out: http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1392&doc_id=242634&image_number=9 Then there's the recycled bottles that get upcycled into weight-bearing bridge beams: http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1392&doc_id=237384

Wow, great, I didn't know that! See, even someone as informed as me about this isn't aware of what is happening in the plastic world...I still think finding alternatives to plastic is the way forward, but all of these recyclable and reuseable options for the plastic already out there are good ones for sure.

Hey, I wasn't either--the bridge, in particular, blew the minds of all of us staff and the readers, with few exceptions. That one was a real motivator to me to find other leading-edge technologies in recycled plastics.

Just read that bridge story...yes that is pretty impressive! I am really enjoying your stories about this topic, look forward to more. It's an important space to cover not just technologically, but also ecologically and, on some levels, ethically.

Tim, the short answers are "it depends, but they're dealt with" and "Yes." Longer answers to your questions would require a few more articles: check out the links given in this article to the ACC-sponsored study, and to this DN story: http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1392&doc_id=242808 as well as "Related posts" at the end of this article.

And, what about the burn off from the fuel when it's used? Most of the pollution we produce is from using fuel, in cars, factories, etc. This process is a good step forward but what about the next step?

Great to see a common-sense and economically proven solution in the area of plastic recycling. Hope that companies who invest in this are also given tax incentives to make it a more attractive investment.

I'm also not quite sure what to make of the statement that "syngas, when mixed with air, can be used with minimal modifications to gasoline or diesel engines." Syngas, as the name implies, is a gas, not a liquid. I think it would take more than just minimal modifications to make an engine (designed to run on liquid fuel) capable of running on a gaseous fuel.

It's possible to produce liquid hydrocarbons from syngas by the Fischer-Tropsch process. Maybe this is what is being referred to, but it involves a lot more than just mixing syngas with air.

Anyway, it's interesting that Dow is investing in this technology, and it will be interesting to see how environmentalists react. I suspect they will be skeptical, since they have opposed waste-to-energy plants in the past. Still, in my opinion, anything that minimizes waste is a good thing.

While this sounds like a grreat way to eliminate a lot of plasice waste, what does it require in terms of energy input? I am thinking of ethanol. It cost more to make than it returns in lower energy fuel. Will Dow become teh new ADM?

While this sounds like a grreat way to eliminate a lot of plasice waste, what does it require in terms of energy input? I am thinking of ethanol. It cost more to make than it returns in lower energy fuel. Will Dow become teh new ADM?

Gorski, many of the systems designed with these technologies--gasification, pyrolysis--are devised to capture and reuse the various forms of "waste" energy (steam, gases, etc.) to power the plant itself, or to sell that "waste" energy to other plants nearby making other things, such as cement kilns. Obviously, this requires locating infrastructure with such uses in mind. The vast majority of plastic-to-fuel energy recovery methods have been designed specifically to be profitable enterprises.

I think with Dow Chemical and Klean Industries coming forward with this joint effort, other companies will realize that recycling is a great approach to aiding our environment and keeping the planet "green". Both have excellent track records using this proven technology. The fact there is a positive economic element to recycling should prove that an ROI is possible if enough development is done in finding the right processes. I certainly applaud their efforts.

The article mentions that the oil was used as fuel for the incinerator but didn't give any details about how much energy was recovered vs. how much energy is used. Wouldn't it be great if it was self-sustaining.

I agree in principle, tekochip. Many of these alternative fuel facilities are being planned to take advantage of "waste" energy of various kinds produced onsite. But whether the fuel being produce can be used to power the site depends on the value of it as sold vs its value to power the plant. Often, as in pyrolysis, there are several products, one of which is sold for a profit, and others--such as escaped steam or some residues--that can be used inhouse to power the plant, or that can be sold externally as other forms of fuel.

Why can't these plastics be incinerated directly without being converted to a (profitable?) oil product? Why not develop a cleann burning process that extracts heat directly from the plasics and other waste materials.

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